“The Outside Is Also Inside”: Reclaiming Intertwined Relationship in the Formation of a Hybrid Subjectivity as a Chinese-Canadian in Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony

Abstract

This paper explores hybrid Canadian in-betweens in contemporary Asian Canadian fiction by focusing on Wayson Choy (1939-2019) and his first novel The Jade Peony (1995). Choy himself is a cross-cultural writer who was born in Vancouver and spent his childhood in the city’s large Chinatown area. And Choy’s generation of Canadian-born Chinese resisted choosing one side of their double identities as Chinese Canadian subjects, but sought out negotiable possibilities for the hybrid integration of two distinctive positions. In The Jade Peony, Choy’s aim is thus to convey how three Canadian-born children of his generation—Jook-Liang, Jung-Sum, and Sek-Lung—negotiate to integrate contradictory subject positions in between the Canadian way and the Chinese way in the process of their construction of hybrid subjectivity. Moreover, Choy’s generation lived through the hard times of the 1930s and 40s amid the historical events of the Great Depression and the Second Sino-Japanese War, in addition to the racist discrimination that resulted from the Chinese Exclusions Act. Through the three Chinese Canadians’ retrospective first-person narrative of their childhood, organized in a coherent chronological manner from 1933 to 1941, Choy thus offers Chinese Canadian history from a different angle. However, even though the geopolitical and cultural territory in which the three narrators’ lives are interwoven is the same, their stories present different aspects of identity formation and distinctive historiography. This paper examines how the three Chinese Canadian subjects construct their unique cross-cultural subjectivity and revive the same historiography from different viewpoints.